Over the past several years, photosharing has become widely accepted by photo enthusiasts. Many websites currently exist that allow users to upload digital images to the site for storage on a server and for viewing by others over the Internet. To share photos, users must first register on a photosharing website, and create an image album in which to store their images. The user typically selects a theme for the image album and selects one or more images to upload to the site from their PC. The images are then uploaded to a server for storage and associated with the selected album. After creating the image album, the user may optionally rename and/or edit each photo.
Metadata, which is typically associated with an image or group or images, is typically supported by photosharing sites. This metadata is restricted in that users cannot define new metadata fields or are limited to a fixed number of “user defined” fields. Metadata support usually does not extend much beyond that defined by the Exif image file format standard. Searches are usually limited to only a subset of the limited metadata that is supported by a site.
The user may then notify others of the album using one of two methods. In the first method, the user sets preferences for the album specifying what users have permission to view the album, and personally informs each person of the web address of the album. In the second and more common method, the user types-in the e-mail addresses of each person the user wants to view the album and the photosharing site automatically sends an e-mail inviting recipients to view the album by clicking on the enclosed URL.
Although the current approach to photosharing works for its intended purpose, there are some areas where the traditional server centric photosharing falls short. Those areas include the difficulties users encounter when attempting to upload images to the site, and the cumbersome process of organizing images once on the site. Due to these difficulties, users predominantly store the majority of their images on their local PC, and upload only those images that they really wish to share with others. Because the shortcomings of current photosharing sites force users to store some of their images on their PCs and other images on the photosharing site, the usage model for web-based photosharing is unnecessarily complicated.
Another problem associated with current photosharing websites is the infrastructure cost inherit in hosting such a space intensive application on a single site. Not only do traditional photosharing sites require vast amounts of disk space to store the photos of all their users, but the owners of the websites must also incur the cost of redundant disk space that is used for backup purposes. Based on high infrastructure costs and the increasing number of users, it is believed that most photosharing sites will pass on this cost to users by transitioning from a free service to a monthly subscription fee model. Charging a fee for using photosharing websites may actually inhibit the widespread adoption of such sites.
Accordingly, what is needed is an improved photosharing architecture. The photosharing architecture should solve both storage and usability problems, and alleviate infrastructure requirements for photosharing. The present invention addresses such a need.